Narrows

You slumber through the afternoon,
turning under the waves like weather,
and now, after dinner, after rosť,

my knuckles smack of charred cedar:
the plank we soaked to grill

the white-pink heaps of walleye.
Smoke of continuance
strung across me now, straight blade
of radio through the gut-low trees
yielding halfway to the stone fence.
(Your bronzed clouds, lobster sun,
and the rain clinging to itself
just as the idea of rain clings
to itself-refuses sky, refuses to stay.)

F. Daniel Rzicznek is the author of the chapbook Cloud Tablets (Kent State
University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in Boston Review, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast,
Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. He teaches English composition at
Bowling Green State University. (4/2007)